1. Field of the Present Invention
The present invention relates generally to information processing and more specifically to obtaining information embedded in unstructured text.
2. Description of Related Art
A large amount of electronic information is freely accessible via public sources such as the Internet. Data may be retrieved from Internet sources using a search engine such as Google, Ask, Msn, AOL, Yahoo!, or the like. The search engines typically receive a query from a user and generate a list of relevant web pages. This list may contain millions of web pages. For example, a search for “Toyota Prius” on Google returns about 2,100,000 results. A researcher may browse hundreds of these documents before being able to assemble a report that includes relevant and comprehensive information. Additionally, users and/or organizations may generate additional data. The ability to sift quickly through large amounts of information is becoming increasingly valuable.
Data may be stored in a database which may be managed by a database management technology or application. Databases may also be used to store proprietary information that is not publicly known such as inventory, customer lists, and supplier lists.
Further, technologies for natural language processing are available. These technologies include software for converting among various file formats and character encoding schemes, part-of-speech tagging, syntactic parsing, information extraction, automated text categorization, word sense disambiguation, information extraction, text segmentation, relationship mining, event detection, toponym resolution, and creation and management of taxonomies, lexicons, and knowledge databases.
Technologies for creating and presenting information stored in databases or included in lengthy documents is available. These technologies include natural language generation, text summarization, and information visualization systems.
While these applications may be used to meet specific needs, they do not provide a unified way of distilling and presenting key information from large amounts of data. There exists a need for an electronic text information system that is able to present data from many different sources as a customized, personalized, and targeted view of key information.